This blog is mainly about the spectacular train wreck at The Sacramento Bee and its parent company, the McClatchy Company. But I also post about current events, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, politics, anything else that grabs my attention. Take a look around this blog, hope you enjoy it.

New Zeal reported this week on Barack Obama’s Marxist neighbor and doctor friend who taught him about the single-payer health care system.

The push to socialize US Heathcare came, not from from the “people”, but from small clique of Marxists, led by a man with close personal ties to president Barack Obama.

This group’s goal is fully socialized, government run “single payer” healthcare-as long promoted through Congressman John Conyers’ National Health Insurance Act, or HR 676.

The leader of this Marxist clique is Quentin Young-a retired Chicago physician, a life long Marxist activist and long time friend and political ally of Barack Obama.

According to radical journalist John Nichols writing in The Progressive;Obama...learned about single-payer health care from his old friend and neighbor Dr. Quentin Young, the longtime coordinator of Physicians for a National Health Program.

Quentin Young told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, that while an Illinois State senator, Obama was a strong supporter of “single payer.”

Barack Obama, in those early days—influenced, I hope, by me and others—categorically said single payer was the best way, and he would inaugurate it if he could get the support, meaning majorities in both houses, which he’s got, and the presidency, which he’s got. And he said that on more than one occasion…. ”

So who exactly is Dr. Quentin Young? According to New Zeal:Quentin Young is one of America’s most committed socialists, beginning with his time in the Young Communist League in late 1930s Chicago.

After WW2, into the mid 1970s, Young was closely associated with the Communist Party and was accused of belonging to the Bethune Club (a communist doctor’s club) by a US Congressional Committee investigating the riots at the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago.

There’s much more. Of course, this surprises no one.

For many years, I heard Dr. Quentin speak and host shows on WBEZ Chicago Public Radio, advocating more government in health care.

Like many leftists infiltrating the mainstream (er, well, WBEZ is left of mainstream but reaches a wide audience) he simply avoided using words like ’socialist’ that would invite criticism of his views.

I never thought I’d live to see the day when we all read an article about a close associate of the POTUS being an admitted Communist and brush it off because it’s just one more Communist/Marxist relationship in a long line of Communist/Marxist relationships.

It doesn’t surprise us anymore, and in fact, it’s what so many of us have come to expect

1. GOING ROGUE, by Sarah Palin2. OPEN, by Andre Agassi3. HAVE A LITTLE FAITH, by Mitch Albom4. ARGUING WITH IDIOTS, written and edited by Glenn Beck, Kevin Balfe and others5. A SIMPLE CHRISTMAS, by Mike Huckabee

The White House Party Crash of 2009: When the Comedy subsides, the Ominous Tragedy Chills (David Horowitz's NewsRealblog)

It is true. You already know about it. Tareq and Michaela Sahali weaseled their way through White House security and crashed the State party. What in the world were they thinking? And what in the world is the world thinking?

As I’m typing this sentence millions of Americans are simultaneously having the same thought:

“If the president can’t secure his own front door from uninvited strangers, how’s he going to keep America safe from terrorist attacks?”

I’m going to risk your un-forgiveness, and not just for my overuse of colons, but for my spontaneous impulse to blurt this out. Here it goes:

What in the ever loving____? Just who in the ____ is minding the store?

Ok, Buster, hand over those keys to the Pennsy Ave. digs right now, you are grounded, mister!

NO MORE PARTIES! Especially the SOCIALIST KIND! Howsabout spending a little of that stimulus allowance on a few rent-a-cops, chief?

White House thinks: “Do we risk offending a guest with a name such as Tareq Sahali , or do we risk the extremely remote chance of him being a W.H. party crasher?

We shall err on the SAFE SIDE!” Call in the expert: WWCD (What would Clinton do?)

Ok, I feel better now. Sorry.

You’ll have to admit, this presidency is so full of tragedy, in order to remain sane one is almost forced to focus on the comedy of it all.

Can any of us wait to hear the Mathews Excuse, or Keith Obamarmann’s spin on this colossal blunder?

Will the far left use this opportunity to beat up Obama because of the extreme dissatisfaction over his conservative style of leadership?

What will the ladies of the View have to say about this national embarrassment?

Building the case for a brand new jobs-creation bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says most Americans would not mind inflating the already-gaping deficit in exchange for more jobs.

The California Democrat said on a conference call Tuesday that Americans could “absorb” the hit to the federal budget, and she argued that their biggest complaint is not that the deficit is big — it’s that they’re not seeing any benefit in return for increasing the U.S. debt load.

While critics cite the jobless rate as a sign that the stimulus has failed, Pelosi argues that the federal government is just not trying hard enough.

“We have to shed any weakness that anybody may have about not wanting to be confrontational on this subject for fear that we’d be labeled not sensitive to the deficit,” Pelosi said, in a recording posted by Think Progress.

“The American people have an anger about the growth of the deficit because they’re not getting anything for it.”

ObamaCare Cost Will Be Closer To 6 Trillion Dollars (Flopping Aces) “Deficit Neutral.” From the lips of Obama himself: “I will not sign it if it adds one dime to the deficit.” Can I get a Joe Wilson “You Lie!” call and feedback please?

Michael F. Cannon from The Cato Institute writes about the trickery involved by Democrats in estimating how much the behemoth known as ObamaCare will cost and what the real cost of the Socialism will be:

One gimmick makes the new entitlement spending appear smaller by not opening the spigot until late in the official 10-year budget window (2010–2019).

Correcting for that gimmick in the Senate version, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) estimates, “When all this new spending occurs” — i.e., from 2014 through 2023 — “this bill will cost $2.5 trillion over that ten-year period.”

Another gimmick pushes much of the legislation’s costs off the federal budget and onto the private sector by requiring individuals and employers to purchase health insurance.

When the bills force somebody to pay $10,000 to the government, the Congressional Budget Office treats that as a tax.

When the government then hands that $10,000 to private insurers, the CBO counts that as government spending.

But when the bills achieve the exact same outcome by forcing somebody to pay $10,000 directly to a private insurance company, it appears nowhere in the official CBO cost estimates — neither as federal revenues nor federal spending.

That’s a sharp departure from how the CBO treated similar mandates in the Clinton health plan. And it hides maybe 60 percent of the legislation’s total costs.

When I correct for that gimmick, it brings total costs to roughly $2.5 trillion (i.e., $1 trillion/0.4).

In October we learned about the upcoming UN Climate Treaty gathering in Copenhagen and how President Barack Obama was expected to sign this thing, making the U.S. Constitution subservient to UN climate law designed to fight a problem that doesn’t even exist.

We have Lord Christopher Monckton of Great Britain to thank for exposing this threat.

Then we heard a few weeks later from the New York Times that the deal was falling apart and that we shouldn’t expect any agreement to come together in Copenhagen in December.

But that was before the ClimateGate release of emails from a key global warming group in Britain which showed global warming fanatics talking to one another about how to manipulate the scientific data so that it appeared to back up their outrageous claims about anthropogenic global warming.

Now that the cat is out of the bag (while the American “mainstream” media is still desperately trying to keep it hush-hush), we learn President Obama is wearing some of the emperor’s new clothes and headed to Copenhagen with the intention of subjugating our nation with this treaty.

This May Be the Nail in the Coffin to Global Warming Junk Science—Renowned statistician and software engineer Eric S. Raymond (ESR) says the global warming “hockey stick” graph data was “hard-coded” or purposefully “fudged.”

Dr. Michael Mann, who co-authored the famous graph of temperature trends dubbed the “hockey stick graph,” was implicated in Climategate this week.

Mann’s controversial work has been challenged in the past.

Today, Reboot Congress reported this stunning news- that the “hockey stick” was fudged.

On his blog Eric Raymond (ESR) comments:

krygny Says: Wait just a second. Explain this to me like I’m 12.

They didn’t even bother to fudge the data? They hard-coded a hockey stick carrier right into the program?!!

ESR says: Yes. Yes, that’s exactly what they did...Of course, they now claim that crucial primary datasets were “accidentally” deleted...After reading some of the emails about evading FOIA2000 requests...accidentally, my ass.

There’s much more. Don’t expect the state-run media to report this any time soon.

As Air Force One heads to Copenhagen for the climate summit Dec. 9, it will presumably not make a U-turn while flying over the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at University of East Anglia near Norwich, England. But perhaps it should.

The 61 megabytes of CRU e-mails and documents made public by a hacker cast serious doubt on the ballyhooed consensus on manmade global warming that the Copenhagen summit was called to address.

The CRU has been a major source of data on global temperatures, relied on by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But the e-mails suggest that CRU scientists have been suppressing and misstating data and working to prevent the publication of conflicting views in peer-reviewed science periodicals.

The most charitable plausible explanation I have seen comes from The Atlantic's Megan McArdle.

"The CRU's main computer model may be, to put it bluntly, complete rubbish."

Australian geologist Ian Plimer, a global warming skeptic, is more blunt. The e-mails "show that data was massaged, numbers were fudged, diagrams were biased, there was destruction of data after freedom of information requests, and there was refusal to submit taxpayer-funded data for independent examination."

Copenhagen, despite Barack Obama's presence, seems sure to be a bust —there will be no agreement on mandatory limits on carbon emissions.

Even if there were, it would probably turn out to be no more effective than the limits others agreed to in Kyoto in 1997.

In any case, China and India are not going to choke off their dazzling economic growth to please Western global warming alarmists.

The more interesting question going forward is whether European and American governmental, academic and corporate elites, having embraced global warming alarmism with religious fervor, will be shaken by the scandalous CRU e-mails. They should be.

Hopes suddenly rose on Friday that a new global climate pact was within reach after rich nations attending a Commonwealth summit in the capital of Trinidad offered to pay poorer countries to help seal the deal.

By showing willingness to meet “the need for money on the table,” it was now “realistic” to expect Copenhagen to result in the framework for a treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012, Rasmussen said.

Copenhagen will not be a talk shop,” Ban said. “We will come out with a very concrete foundation for a legally binding treaty.”

The willingness of developed countries to ante up bolstered other moves that suggested nations were determined to reach an accord.

ClimateGate's Michael Mann To Be Investigated By Penn State (Newsbusters)

As a result of the growing ClimateGate [0] scandal, Penn State University will be investigating Michael Mann, its high-profile professor on the sending and receiving end of controversial e-mail messages recently obtained from a British Climate Research Unit.

For those unfamiliar, Mann, as one of the originators of the infamous Hockey Stick graph [1], is the climatologist at the very heart of the global warming myth.

As the creator of "Mike's Nature trick," a particularly damning phrase used in one of the e-mail messages in question, Mann is also a key figure in ClimateGate.

Given his importance to the movement and all those involved including Nobel Laureate Al Gore, President Obama, and Congressional Democrats desperately trying to enact cap and trade legislation, it will be very interesting to see how this press release [2] from Penn State gets reported in the coming days (h/t Anthony Watts [3] via Marc Morano [4]):

WASHINGTON — A new global warming treaty would be all economic pain and little environmental gain for America even if China and other fast-developing nations sign on as well.

But if developing nations remain exempted, it would be all economic pain and no environmental gain. Either way, America should stay out! At the United Nations’ Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen in early December proponents of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol — which expires in 2012 — will try to hash out a new international agreement for lowering carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions.

In other words, a new global energy tax may be in the works.

The United States did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol, and for good reason.

Its provisions would have cost American consumers trillions, while having virtually no impact on world temperatures.

A week after my colleague James Delingpole, on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times.

But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.

The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics.

Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports...

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head...

Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today...

According to Janet Napolitano, the Obama administration will insist on a path to citizenship for illegal aliens when it pushes for comprehensive immigration "reform" in 2010.

The legislation will grant illegal aliens amnesty from serious job-related felonies including document fraud, perjury on I-9 forms and even identity theft.

It is quietly ensuring that illegal aliens who lose their jobs are allowed to remain here rather than being prosecuted/deported.

In addition to ending virtually all arrests, prosecutions, and deportations resulting from workplace crimes, the administration has restricted state and local law enforcement's ability under the 287(g) program to help immigration authorites identify and remove illegal aliens who commit crimes.

Obama is sending a loud and clear message to the millions of illegals:

You can continue to live and work in the United States; you can continue to commit employment-related felonies in order to steal jobs from citizens without fear of arrest or deportation; you can continue to destroy the credit records of millions of American children whose identity information you have stolen; you can continue to saddle Americans whose Social Security numbers you are using with arrest records, and even income tax liabilities for income you earned but did not pay taxes on.

If you drive without a license, without auto insurance, or drunk, it will not jeopardize your ability to stay in the United States.

The Obama administration has made it absolutely clear whose side it's on: And it's definitely not the side of American citizens and taxpayers!

China Jails Environmentalist Wanted in U.S. (ELF ecoterrorist)(The New York Times) Funny how the America haters suddenly want to be sent home to the Great Satan soon as they get in hot water overseas.

DALI, China — Justin Franchi Solondz, an environmental activist from New Jersey who spent years evading charges of ecoterrorism in the United States by hiding out in China, was sentenced to three years in prison by a local court on Friday on charges of manufacturing drugs in this backpacker haven.

After serving his time, Mr. Solondz, 30, who is on the F.B.I.’s wanted list, will be deported to the United States, where he faces charges stemming from what the authorities say was his role in an arson rampage that destroyed buildings in three western states as a member of a group related to the environmental extremist organization Earth Liberation Front. He was indicted in absentia in 2006.

...During a daylong trial last month, Mr. Solondz pleaded guilty to drug charges and asked to be deported to the United States.

The 22 women, who were among the 57people killed in this week’s shocking massacre in the southern Philippines were sexually mutilated, government authorities have confirmed.

“Even the private parts of the women were shot at,” Justice Secretary Agnes Devanadera, said on national television. “It was horrible. It was not done to just one. It was done practically to all the women.”

Muslims also sexually mutiliated their female victims in Mumbai, India last year.

While work continued to identify all the dead, the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines has reported that 30 journalists and their support staff have been been killed.

About a dozen of the victims were the relatives, lawyers and supporters of Esmael Mangudadatu, a local politician whose determination to challenge the entrenched Ampatuan clan in an upcoming gubernatorial election touched off the violence.

Investigators said that the rest of the victims, perhaps as many as 15, happened to be stopped at a checkpoint along the highway in Ampatuan, a town in Maguindanao Province, when the convoy of Mangudadatu supporters and journalists was stopped by police officers and militiamen loyal to the Ampatuans.

They were killed in an effort to eliminate witnesses, investigators affirm.

Thanks to the paid lobbyist group (Freedom Works?) or staff member who finds and posts the anti-Obama dirt in the "Got News or an Update?" thread every morning. How about identifying who pays you so we can judge their motives?

I got a better idea. Go talk to your boss and have him advocate McClatchy actually reporting real news. While you're at it, have a talk with him about all your anonymous editorial board advertorials that you get paid 10 times the normal advertising rate for.

5:40... no, the real question is who is paying the main stream media to not report the news. Who is benefiting from our classically trained professional journalists with the highest ethical standards ignoring major news stories from Edwards and his cheating while using his dying wife as a campaign prop to the current global warming hoax?

Who is paying you to not do your job? How much did it cost for you to become a sell out? At what point did you put your professional pride aside and become an unquestioning team Obama kneepad former journalist?

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